18 February 2013

Quiet Time

Still a bit of a quiet time with the coin hoard. We are all waiting on developments over the next month or so that should allow us to start the conservation work in earnest.

Still a bit of a quiet time with the coin hoard. We are all waiting on developments over the next month or so that should allow us to start the conservation work in earnest. We did have a slight wobble with the coin numbers last week however. For some time I'd been thinking that my initial estimate of their numbers (70,000) was begining to look a bit high. This is because it was based on the hoard being an average of 15cm thick, top to bottom. The more revealing of its base I did the more it became apparent that it probably averaged closer to 13cm. This shouldn't matter of course as only the accurate figure is important but it was with a slightly heavy heart that I re-did the maths and came up with a new, lower figure of 61,000 coins. Still Britain's biggest hoard but coming perilously close to the Frome hoard of 52,000. Competitive, me? My worries were put to an end a couple of days later however when I was thinking about the hoard's base. As it still sits on a layer of earth, we had just worked on the assumption that it has a flat bottom. I realized all I had to do was dig a small trench under a part of the hoard to check this. I duly did so and found that the belly of the hoard is actually boat shaped, going down another 6cm from the bottom of the hoard's walls. Some rough maths on this depth adds slightly more coins than I took off a few days before. Back to a conservative estimate of 70,000 then, hurray!